Photo: Paul Morigi / Getty Images
By: David Torres
Monday, September 30
Senators, in immigration, now have the floor
Sometimes downcast, other times mildly hopeful, the postponed immigration reform has represented an episode of ups and downs for contemporary United States history that, if it did not drag the lives of millions of human beings with it, it would be nothing more than a minor topic in the American anecdote.
But it turns out that for the last three decades, the promise of immigration reform has been the more concrete hold of hundreds of thousands of working families who persist in believing that, now, the next one is the good one, the one that will fully integrate them into the American social experiment for which they have literally sacrificed everything; from the abandonment of their countries of origin, to the impossibility of seeing their loved ones again for decades. Sometimes, even, they never see them again, or hug them.
That is why when new hopes for immigration relief arise, such as the recent vote in the Lower House that approved the Better Reconstruction Bill (BBB), by 220 to 213, something is moving again in the immigrant’s psyche that prevents him from lowering his guard in his efforts to be taken into account sometime as subject of full rights in this country of adoption.
And although this piece of legislation would only provide in the first instance work permits and protections against deportation during 10 years, the mere possibility of working without the fear of being expelled from the country makes me momentarily regain serenity. This, always with the intention of not forgetting that the original struggle was and is the immigration regularization of more than 11 millions of undocumented so that they can later have a path to citizenship.
Incomplete in many ways for the original interests of those millions of undocumented and their allies, the approval of the BBB law has now also passed to the Senate for debate and subsequent vote, amid a cloud of speculation and discouraging scenarios – such as the foolish stance against by Democrats Joe Manchin (WV ) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), as well as Senate advisor Elizabeth McDonough—, but it is still a impasse politician who gives a new impulse to hope.
There are recriminations , of course. Especially towards the part that has promised the most, but has shown the most weakness, like the Democrats, when it comes to specifying what is definitive, what is so often expected. The recalcitrant and hypocritical republican blockade is also directly pointed out, which not only opposes any immigration benefit for political-ideological reasons, but has even been able to rise for four years (2016 – 2020) the most anti-immigrant and racist former president that the United States has ever had in its recent history.
But beyond mutual accusations, what should be prioritized is not who wins the most applause from their respective followers, but who is capable of truly and essentially understanding what it means to emigrate in this 21st century, which promised to be a different economic and political scenario, supported by technology, which supposedly would help solve many of the most pressing problems on the planet.
However, we have already seen that no, that this century has been the paradoxical platform on which the distances between those who have everything and those who have nothing; a century in which millions of human beings continue to move around the planet in search of refuge, while disgustingly the fortune of the richest man in the world becomes more important news; a century in which the formulas to end poverty collide with the perverse formulas to keep it the same or make it worse; a century, in short, in which a deadly virus has dictated the pattern for the mobility or stagnation of world society.
I don’t know know if the final will of the United States Senate is directed towards the historical position of benefiting, now, millions of undocumented immigrants who have more than demonstrated what their workforce means, social, cultural, economic, historical, linguistic, fiscal and political . What is known is that as long as the Senate continues to be an obstacle for immigrants and opposes their full inclusion in the country, the anti-immigrant forces will continue to rearrange and strengthen themselves with the sole purpose of demonizing, insulting and attacking a phenomenon such as the migratory that they do not want to study or understand, but of which they are also and have been part, whether they accept it or not.
And that, in short, can become the preamble to another barbarism against democracy, how well it works for the most anti-immigrant wing of the United States.